The Harbor Master eBook

“Lay there, ye scum!” cried Black Dennis
Nolan, breathing heavily, and wiping blood from his
chin with the back of his hand. “Lay there
an’ be damned to ye, if ye t’ink ye kin
say ‘nay’ when Dennis Nolan says ‘aye.’
If it didn’t be for the childern ye bes father
of, an’ yer poor, dacent woman, I’d t’row
ye over the cliff.”

Foxey Jack Quinn was in no condition to reply to the
skipper’s address. In fact, he did not
hear a word of it. Two of the men picked him up
and carried him down a steep and twisting path to
his cabin at the back of the harbor, above the green
water and the gray drying-stages, and beneath the
edge of the vast and empty barren. He opened one
eye as they laid him on the bed in the one room of
the cabin. He glared up at the two men and then
around at his horrified wife and children.

“Folks,” said he, “I’ll be
sure the death o’ Black Dennis Nolan. Aye,
so help me Saint Peter. I’ll send ‘im
to hell, all suddent un’ unready, for the black
deed he done this day!”

That was the first time the skipper showed the weight
of his fist. His followers were impressed by
the exhibition. The work went steadily on among
the rocks in front of Chance Along for ten days, and
then came twenty-four hours of furious wind and driving
snow out of the northwest. This was followed
by a brief lull, a biting nip of frost that registered
thirty degrees below zero, and then fog and wind out
of the east. After the snowy gale, during the
day of still, bitter cold, relief parties went to
Squid Beach and Nolan’s Cove and brought in the
half-frozen watchers. For a day the look-out
stations were deserted, the people finding it all
they could do to keep from freezing in their sheltered
cabins in Chance Along; but with the coming of the
east wind and the fog, the huts of sods were again
occupied.

The fog rolled in about an hour before noon; and shortly
after midnight the man from Nolan’s Cove groped
his way along the edge of the cliff, down the twisty
path to the cluster of cabins, and to Black Dennis
Nolan’s door. He pounded and kicked the
door until the whole building trembled.

“What bes ye a-wantin’ now?” bawled
the skipper, from within.

“I seed a blue flare an’ heared a gun
a-firing to the sou’east o’ the cove,”
bawled the visitor, in reply.

The skipper opened the door.

“Come in, lad! Come in!” he cried.

He lit a candle and set to work swiftly pulling on
his outer clothes and sea-boots.

Pat Lynch slopped rum into a tin mug, gulped it greedily,
and stumbled from the candle-light out again to the
choking fog. He would have liked to remain inside
long enough to swallow another drain and fill and light
his pipe; but with Black Dennis Nolan roaring at him
like a walrus, he had not ventured to delay.
He groped his way from cabin to cabin, kicking on
doors and bellowing the skipper’s orders.